From a young age, many of us dream of the houses we’ll own. But those dreams don’t get into the reality of how much houses cost. These days, buying a house means getting a mortgage – which can wind up taking decades to pay off. And that’s if you keep from defaulting – defaults in the Golden State are more than double the national average.

JAY SHAFER: When you look at events like the housing bust – which eventually caused a worldwide economic downturn – you know, people were being forced into more house than they could afford.

When Jay Shafer says “more house,” he means it literally – as in, they were just too big. Shafer owns the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, based in Graton, California.

SHAFER: The banks wouldn’t give loans for houses that were small … These things are really very much a part of what caused this economic downturn, and yet nobody talks about it.

In recent years, Shafer’s become the face of the “tiny-house movement.” It’s a diverse spectrum of people who live in houses that are so small, they’re often illegal. Yes, there’s such a thing as a house that’s legally too small.

So what has driven some Bay Area residents into such tiny quarters? KALW’s Jon Atkinson reports.

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JON ATKINSON: Walt Whitman wrote that “a man is not a whole and complete man unless he owns a house and the ground it stands on.” I’m thinking of those words as I pull up in Graton, for a tour of Jay Shafer’s latest tiny-house.

It’s just seven-by-fourteen feet – so small, it violates current housing codes. That’s one of the reasons it’s mounted on a trailer-bed: Housing regulations are really extensive, but trailer regulations are practically non-existent.

JAY SHAFER: Stepping right inside the front door, to the left side we’ve got the kitchen, which is very small – just about four-and-a-half or maybe four feet long… To the right side of the front door, there is the bathroom, which is probably the smallest full bath in the world – as far as I know, anyway…

Shafer’s a practiced salesman: He’s given Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper similar tours. The New Yorker calls him “the brainy misfit behind the tiny-house trend,” and he’s definitely the closest thing the movement has to a celebrity.

Shafer often says there’s something “luxurious” about living simply: It frees you up to do what you actually enjoy, since you’re not constantly working to pay for a lot of stuff you can’t afford.

SHAFER: It’s really about buying less and living with less – living with just what you need to be happy, rather than a bunch of extra stuff.

So, there’s a philosophical reason to go small. But for others…

STEPHEN MARSHALL: …It’s more a pragmatic solution to economic and personal need than it is a change in lifestyle of “now I don’t want so much.”

Stephen Marshall owns a business in Petaluma called Little House on the Trailer.

MARSHALL: I get a fair amount of walk-in traffic, because we’re sitting here on the highway in a used car lot. So people notice, and everybody’s sort of enchanted by the idea.

Marshall says that when many of these people come through, they talk about trying to use less, or be green.

MARSHALL: That’s all the idealistic narrative around little houses. None of those people, not one of those people, out of, say, 30 houses that we’ve sold now, has been a buyer.

His clients are more practical. Many of them buy his houses for their elderly parents. That’s where economics kicks in.

On average, you’ll pay about $2,500 a month to move your parents into an assisted living facility. But for around $6,000, Marshall will build you a little house, and you can park your parents in the backyard, and take care of them yourself.

Marshall’s clients aren’t worrying about saving the world. They want their immediate needs met, at the best price.

BILL GLANTING: It’s sort of reminiscent of a little ship’s cabin. And I’ll close the door. And it’s nice and airtight and cozy and warm. And you look up here, we’ve got a skylight…

Bill Glanting built a tiny house in his backyard in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood. One of his sons moved home after graduating from UCLA – he kept sending out resumes, but couldn’t find a job. At the same time, Glanting’s younger son also decided to move home, from Davis.

GLANTING: I was not about to say, “Well too bad, you’re old enough, go out and get a job,” or something, because that really wasn’t a viable solution. You know, I’m not gonna turn my sons out in the street. But we needed more room.

Glanting’s main house is already pretty small by many people’s standards: It’s 1,000 square feet. He built his backyard cabana himself, for somewhere between $2,000-3,000. It’s an addition – a guesthouse. But others are actually moving full-time into smaller places.

Brenda Daugherty and her partner, Cece Reinhardt, recently moved into an Airstream – one of those vaguely retro, silver-bullet-type trailers. To do so, they’ve had to downsize to meet strict limits – their overall weight can’t be more than 15,000 pounds.

BRENDA DAUGHERTY: We come back from being weighed, we bring in the scale, and we start putting stuff on the scale. “Okay, that’s three pounds of wool curtain, that’s coming out … an extra pair of scissors, and a pot and a pan, that’s eight pounds – take it out!”

CECE REINHARDT: So we shaved 88 pounds in two hours, and we’re very proud.

It’s not a tiny-house – they’d like one of those in a few years, maybe – but they’re definitely engaging in some tiny-living. The trailer is 25 feet long – 160 square feet.

REINHARDT: It took us living in excess many years, kind of the California dream, where we thought we were supposed to each have a car, and we had a big house… It took several years of that and then looking at our bank accounts each month and our savings each month and our retirement and going, “Yeah, this isn’t exactly where we wanted to go.”

Slowly, they started to downsize. They got rid of things they hadn’t used in a year, and sold their big house to rent a smaller place. They’re debt-free now, and have begun to save money.

DAUGHERTY: I think it was a bit of a kick to my ego to actually admit that you don’t need all this stuff, and this stuff isn’t what you thought this stuff would bring you.

Talking to Reinhardt and Daugherty, it strikes me that their reasons for downsizing have a lot in common with Henry David Thoreau’s. In the 1840s, he moved into his own tiny-house, an experience he described in Walden, where he wrote that “the cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

How does my stuff influence the life that I live? How much of my life will I spend paying for that stuff – and how do I actually feel about that?

These are the questions tiny-housers are asking. They’re big ones, and have to do with the meaning of life itself. So it makes sense that, to answer them, these people have started by rethinking the places they live.

For Crosscurrents, I’m Jon Atkinson.

Could you permanently live in a tiny house? What are you doing to cut back during this difficult economic times? Let us know on our Facebook page.